30 years of state run schools and colleges telling everyone you absolutely need a college degree and everyone who works in the trades is a loser has resulted in a massive skilled tradesman deficit.
I know more tradesmen that are leaving the trades than joining, and they are usually the best among their group. Being a skilled framer often nets you nothing over being a barely competent framer. Despite all these claims of trades making huge money, most tradesmen are not. For ever plumber in NYC making $50 an hour, there is a dozen other contractors working for $12 an hour using their own tools and trucks fighting over the scraps of lower class business who can barely afford them.
Every indutry that doesnt reward skill qill eventually go to shit
Hair color and bleach is nasty stuff.
HVAC installation costs as much as a car in warmer regions.
General handyman work outclasses all retail jobs, but you don't hear about people with two bachelors doing that type of work like you do at a Starbucks.
I'm inclined towards the skilled trade side of things because I like getting my hands dirty but I understand why people wouldn't want to do a job that has you in a shop or working out in the heat, cold, or rain on a regular basis. Not to mention I imagine the injury and/or casualty rate is much higher for many trades compared to desk jobs.
TLDR: We obviously need both and they are equally good fields but I completely understand the perceived higher valuation for the safer, less physically taxing albeit often more boring and sedimentary jobs.
I wouldn't qualify for workers compensation for my herniated disc because I don't know when it started or why. But it's probably from sitting in front of a computer. Asking coworkers over 35, they almost all have injuries from computer work.
Maintaining weight and strength while a huge chunk of your day is sedentary is a big chore too.
I'd argue the public perceives sedentary jobs as much safer because of this even if they may not be in reality.
Why would you ever consider doing that? Livable wage discussions are about what’s livable, not how much value the job provides.
But sure. Let’s tie federal minimum wage to inflation and then do local cost-of-living adjustments, say make minimum wage equal to, say, three times the typical rent for a two bedroom apartment in the area. That way places that might really struggle with $21/hour minimum wage (like Wichita, Kansas) but have low housing cost would be able to maintain adequate employment levels and attract business investment. (It would also force NIMBY-heavy communities like San Jose, California actually have to pay a consequence for extreme housing costs in the form of higher wage costs for local low-skill services… Encouraging more housing to be built.)
A plumber might make a lot more money but they’ll never be able to shake the association with dirty, unpleasant work, despite the fact that a great deal of plumbers work in new installations for construction rather than household repair.
When I think of young and old PhDs alike, I don't think of high status individuals. I think of people who spent too long in academia. Most of them don't contribute breakthrough insights to their field in their lifetime, but rather make indentations to broader collective knowledge. That's not high status to me.
I think more highly of someone who owns their own plumbing business. An employer has more status to me because they command labor. A PhD graduate will most of the time be contributing deep narrow insight to a larger organization, not using their studies for entrepreneurial pursuits.
This is fast changing. The days of "ooh they work in an office" vs. your average handyman are mostly gone US metro areas. If anything, electricians, mechanics, carpenters, firefighters, etc. are seen as "manly men" with the surviving traditional masculinity compared to most men in metro areas.
(And in general, I think mechanization is under-appreciated as a productivity enhancer compared to automation... Who is more productive moving something like gravel around, someone driving a 5 ton capacity dump truck or someone overseeing 100 gravel-moving drones with a capacity of 5 kilograms each? Even if the drones are essentially autonomous, the dump truck driver will be more productive in moving the material around because he's driving a big machine and the drones will need someone to manage them especially when there are problems. Or even compare 5 ton autonomous mining trucks with a 500 ton dump truck... the 500 tonner is gonna win. Larger scale machines are still a pretty straightforward way to improve productivity.)
I guess I’m just saying that scaling up your smaller machine to be larger has the same kind of productivity enhancements as switching your smaller machine to autonomous. It is also something humans have been doing ever since the development of domestic beasts of burden.
I met a guy a few years ago who had a plumber role in one of those modular factories... he said he was paid lesser but he likened it to a 9-5 job in a factory, and was ok with the pay.
So the skilled labor content of plumbing a house has decreased over the years.
Every house in my neighborhood has hardwood floors throughout -- it was cheap when the subdivision was built out, but laborious to install. Today, the same class of house would have carpeting or sheet flooring, costing a lot less to install.
Other things like vinyl siding, Romex instead of hard conduit, etc.
You can be a massively skilled electronic engineer, but you don't need to hand solder every board to have a great, skilled, outcome. I guess the answer is all the machinery we employ for larger buildings, but there's no real equivalent for the individual suburban home which still involves most of the manual labor.
OTOH, I, a physicist, used to be a certified NASA solderer.
That was in the days before surface mount.
Interestingly, no electrician I've used knew what inductive coupling was. :-(
Inductive coupling is one of the most fascinating topics in EM. And, is all the power really flowing in the air between the wires? The electricians don’t know that, either.
I'm the one who teaches the chemists to solder. ;-)
Good small time subcontractors show up to the job themselves but train others to do most of the work.
Subs I worked with had pretty healthy markup over what they were paying their workers (>100% when invoicing hours).
The catch is they all had spent years learning the trade, and that part is definitely dangerous. I saw a guy ruin his back being over eager pouring concrete.
Suburban housing is very easy to build. Building 1 storey houses is not a challenge anywhere in the world, and it is possible to build it super cheap even without any capital equipment.
Steel housing is a prime example that even a double digit percentage cost advantage, with it being a very straightforward, and overwhelmingly superior, replacement for wooden framing, doesn't seem to been enough to drive new technology adoption in USA.
It was in 2nd year when I watched a youtube video when some guy actually explained thay you need to heat up the pad on the board, then add solder. I was totally flabbergased.
Soldering was a very minor part of my degree, so it didn't really matter, but still.
I’m thinking that, when you first learned to solder, you remembered the first step but not the second one, and thus got off on the wrong foot.
I think it’s not as bad in single family construction as commercial work, since the activity varies more over the day/week. But still, I can’t imagine my body not breaking if I did this for a career.
OTOH electrical work seems mostly reasonable. If one of my kids wanted to get into a trade that’s where I’d steer them.
You're starting it at best in your mid-to-late twenties? And even if you played sports in HS and go to the gym regularly, your body just isn't used to it and it's past the point where it can quickly adapt and more importantly get used to the stimulus. You're likely much more prone to injury than someone fifteen years older than you whose been doing that work since they were 17 (I'm sure I am too, it would destroy and I am very active for a SWE).
I do consider myself very fit/active, but it’s not the strength or stamina that’s the limiting factor, it’s the holding weight at weird angles, or applying torque, or just reaching out over my center of mass for hours.
Anecdotally it seems like the specialists have it worst. His friends who did flooring all have wrecked knees, and the drywall hangers have messed up shoulders. He seems to have made it out unscathed, though other generalists he knows have back problems.
I've had people come to my house to do handyman work, and at the same age as me, they are hobbling and broken.
I suspect that one of the causes of the opioid crisis is that we had a pain crisis, caused by bad working conditions. I could imagine advising one of my kids to go into the trades, but only if they move to a country with decent labor laws, safety net, and health care. Not in the US.
And at the moment the software field seems a lot more financially rewarding to smart, practical young people trying to figure out what field they should go into.
I'd say it's the same process even in China these days.
There was a big stir online few years ago where it came to light that Shenzhen polytech grads have significantly larger salaries, and employment than much more prestigious university graduates.
On other side, I see more, and more Chinese companies becoming carbon copies of American corporates with engineering offices stuffed full of MBA's, and needing 10 SWOT analyses to fix a single line of code bug.
More power to him!